Introduction: Demography, Population Growth, and Population Policy in China: A Brief History from 1949 to the Present

Abstract

Research on the Chinese population is at once intriguing and challenging as well as difficult and frustrating. For some three decades after the founding of the People's Republic of China, Chinese Studies has had to live with the paradoxical situation in which the abundance of population on the Mainland, ever increasing in number predictably and inexorably, was coupled with a scarcity of data about the nature and patterns of demographic change, ever harder to come by. Concurrent with this situation of scarcity (the chronic problem of "minimal data" as China experts called it) amidst abundance, we find that inside China demography, for all intents and purposes, did not exist and that outside of China it was often reduced to intelligence gathering, an operation in which seasoned China experts chronicled policy statements and attempted to puzzle together reasonable population estimates or our best "guesstimates" based on scattered fragments gleaned from official Chinese announcements, rumors, and inferences. Not unexpectedly, therefore, over the years such a poor ecology for population research could support, for example, barely a handful of American experts on Chinese population.